HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED IN NEW YORK:
Over the weekend, the New York City Parks Department was targeted by hundreds of young Jewish children who gathered in defiance of social-distancing guidelines and called on Gov. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio to “end the madness” and “immediately reopen our playgrounds.” They had in mind one park in particular—a commons in Williamsburg, just a few miles from the site of this weekend’s mass gathering at the Brooklyn Museum. But the mayor has insisted that all parks should remain shut out of “an abundance of caution,” as though that caution hadn’t been entirely dispensed with for the better part of the last three weeks. The city’s response to this demonstration was swift: On Monday morning, Parks Department officials welded the park’s doors shut.
On Sunday, more evidence emerged that a different set of rules applies to New Yorkers who violate public health imperatives but do so in service to causes that resonate with Democratic politicians. The City reporter Greg Smith discovered that the city’s nascent “contact-tracing” program had carved out a special exception for protesters. Dr. Ted Long, the head of New York City’s efforts to track down the individuals with whom a virus-carrier had contact, spent weeks urging anyone who was part of the protest-related crowds to get tested. But Smith discovered that the city’s tracing regime has all but gone out of its way to avoid the investigatory work that would make such a program effective. “No person will be asked proactively if they attended a protest,” said Blasio’s spokesperson Avery Cohen. In sum, contract tracers won’t be doing much contact tracing if it might lead investigators back to these previous weeks of state-endorsed protests. Perhaps the city does not want to discourage stricken protesters from participating in the city’s tracing regime. Or maybe they want to avoid an ugly headline if the city’s hospitals begin filling up again.
As predicted by America’s Newspaper of Record: WHO Scientists Confirm Coronavirus Only Spreads At Conservative Protests.